30 Sep
2026
30 Sep
'26
8:21 a.m.
Oh, right. Come to think of it, so does BASIC-PLUS (when not in "extend" mode)
and perhaps other classic BASIC versions.
paul
On Sep 30, 2026, at 11:19 AM, Norman Jaffe
<turing(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
Classic FORTRAN also (mostly) ignores white space, except for the first columns of a
line.
That is, the following are equivalent:
PROGRAM
P R O G R A M
PRO GRAM
PR OG RA M
From: "Paul Koning via cctalk" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
To: "cctalk" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Cc: "Paul Koning" <paulkoning(a)comcast.net>
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2026 8:10:21 AM
Subject: [cctalk] Re: Good computer books for 1960's computers
On Sep 30, 2026, at 9:30 AM, ben via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 2026-09-29 5:57 p.m., Jim Davis via cctalk wrote:
Huh? The only language I can think of that ignores whitespace is TECO. Just about
everything else treats whitespace as a token separator.
paul
And all our daily driver languages look like
Algol or FORTRAN,
excepting Forth and APL, both written by mad scientists,
And token parsing still is from the 1950's for many languages
where blank spaces are ignored and a end of line/card or semicolon
is needed to separate id's.